Thursday, August 27, 2015

Katrina

This morning, there are the many articles about the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and all the various evils and errors that came from it. Blame, of course, is put on the various government administrations with some people more or less burned in journalistic effigy. None of them, however, mention that New Orleans was a textbook example of warnings on what not to do and where not live in undergraduate Natural Hazards and Water Resource management classed for decades before Katrina. This was not buried in obscure Academic journals,this was in undergraduate textbooks. There were plans, studies and two generations of scholars, scientists and engineers screaming " It is a disaster waiting to happen, not if, but when". But, because partytown with a bunch of horn players and some decent food has been there for a couple hundred years, the rest of the country is forced to pour in resources to protect and pump the water from a place that is below sea level and subsiding, while industry destroys the coastal wetlands. And when the disaster does happen, and the governor and the typically useless mayor of a city and state so dysfunctional that bribery is considered normal business, sit on their thumbs like halfwits terrified of the fact that what they had been warned of was actually going to happen, they then sat there blaming a small federal agency with no police powers and no authority. I have no sympathy. You built a house on an island and complained about getting flooded out in the spring. You were warned. A thousand times. And now, for ten years since, we have been told of the evils of redevelopment, how people have not returned, how there has been no funding for ordinary people. That is all typical, for the connected and powerful circle government funding and contracts like vultures. Here is the problem...No one should live there. No one. We should simply have resettled people elsewhere, rather than pouring money into a place that does not belong there. We should have cleaned up and bulldozed and let the water reclaim much of the place. Let it wither and die.